DR. FRANCIS SCHAEFFER

I was re-listening to a Focus on the Family CD of the famous Dr. Francis Schaeffer. If you have never read his books or heard him speak he is a legend and you need to check him out. The CD I listened to was entitled "America's Moral Freefall" which was a talk that he gave in 1982, go here to see the transcript. He talks about how important the Christian Worldview is and how Christians cannot stay silent while our culture is taken over by secular humanists. Here is an excerpt about his Christian Manifesto which is what the talk was based on:

"Dr. Schaeffer, who was one of the most influential Christian thinkers in the twentieth century, shows that secular humanism has displaced the Judeo-Christian consensus that once defined our nation's moral boundaries. Law, education, and medicine have all been reshaped for the worse as a consequence. America's dominant worldview changed, Schaeffer charges, when Christians weren't looking.

"Where have the Bible-believing Christians been in the last 40 years?" asks Schaeffer. "Where have we been as we have changed to this other consensus and all the horrors and stupidity of the present moment have come down on our culture?"

Schaeffer lists two reasons for evangelical indifference: a false concept of spirituality and fear. He calls on believers to stand against the tyranny and moral chaos that come when humanism reigns—and warns that believers may, at some point, be forced to make the hard choice between obeying God or Caesar. A Christian Manifesto is a thought-provoking and bracing Christian analysis of American culture and the obligation Christians have to engage the culture with the claims of Christ."

Here is one of my favorite parts of the address:

"It should be noticed that this new dominant world view is a view which is exactly opposite from that of the founding fathers of this country. Now, not all the founding fathers were individually, personally, Christians. That certainly is true. But, nevertheless, they founded the country on the base that there is a God who is the Creator (now I come to the next central phrase) who gave the inalienable rights.

We must understand something very thoroughly. If society -- if the state gives the rights, it can take them away -- they're not inalienable. If the states give the rights, they can change them and manipulate them. But this was not the view of the founding fathers of this country. They believed, although not all of them were individual Christians, that there was a Creator and that this Creator gave the inalienable rights -- this upon which our country was founded and which has given us the freedoms which we still have -- even the freedoms which are being used now to destroy the freedoms.

The reason that these freedoms were there is because they believed there was somebody who gave the inalienable rights. But if we have the view that the final reality is material or energy which has existed forever in some form, we must understand that this view never, never, never would have given the rights which we now know and which, unhappily, I say to you (those of you who are Christians) that too often you take all too much for granted. You forget that the freedoms which we have in northern Europe after the Reformation (and the United States is an extension of that, as would be Australia or Canada, New Zealand, etc.) are absolutely unique in the world."